


it's either fishing or bingo

by Snickfic



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Belly Kink, Food, M/M, Masturbation, Post-Black Panther (2018), Retirement, Stuffing, Wakanda (Marvel), Weight Gain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:40:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27752452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: After he retires, Bucky eats a lot of great food, finds out some new things about himself, and learns to let (himself) go.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 18
Kudos: 164
Collections: We <3 Bellies - Round 1





	it's either fishing or bingo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seinmit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/gifts).



“Steve,” Bucky said, their last night together. “You get that I’m retired now, right?”

Steve stilled, his chest unmoving under Bucky’s hand. Then he sighed all his air out, and he said, “I know.”

“You’re gonna go out there in the world, you and Wilson and Romanov, and I’m gonna be here in Wakanda, retired. I won’t be able to just pick up and save your ass anymore.”

“Is that what this is?” Steve asked, his smile audible in the dark. He folded his hand over Bucky’s. “The ‘don’t get killed’ talk?”

Bucky didn’t even dignify that with comment. No speech would have been enough to say something like that. He’d already said all of it he could with his body, his hands on Steve’s hips, his mouth on Steve’s skin. Words couldn’t help. “I’m gonna be doing things a retired guy does. Too busy for the likes of you.”

There was a long, thoughtful pause. “Like fishing?”

Bucky laughed and pinched Steve’s side, and that was the end of serious conversation for a while. It was just as well. He didn’t have much better idea than Steve what retired life looked like.

* * *

Retirement had a lot more goats in it than Bucky would have predicted. He learned a lot about them, that first couple of months. He learned how to smell a billy goat as it tried to sneak up on him, how to sweet-talk a doe into standing still long enough to milk her. (The real trick was distracting her with food, which the goatherds let him in on after a week or two of him getting his bucket kicked over every morning and evening.) 

For longer than he could remember, he’d known how to sit still; now he learned to relax into it. Six weeks in, his body was starting to believe nobody here meant him harm—at least, until someone made an unexpected noise. But even that happened less often, because he got used to the noises, and there were longer and longer stretches where he just went about his day: checking on goats, running children out of his hut (and then admiring with appropriate enthusiasm whatever they’d brought to show him that day), visiting Shuri for checkups or, eventually, just to chat.

And eating. There was a lot of that. A month or so into retired life, he realized there was a whole nation’s worth of cuisine he’d never tried before and that he wanted to eat all of it. He was pretty sure the stew one of the goatherds served him from over a fire was the best thing he’d tasted in all his hundred years. The white meat was tender and the chunks of squash melted in his mouth. He ate three servings and only refused a fourth because Kiyo and her family had better things to do that feed a super soldier metabolism.

He coaxed her into teaching him how to make it, though. It took three lessons, but the next batch he made after that tasted almost as good as hers, the spices tingling in his nose and bringing just enough heat to keep things interesting. He ate the whole damn pot that night and barely even noticed until his spoon hit the bottom.

That’s when he noticed other things, too. He was warm, even sweating a little; that heat from the spices had added up. He was also really full. No wonder, with a whole pot of stew in him, but still, he was really full. He felt heavy, enormous with stew, entirely unwilling to move or do anything else but sit there and be gloriously, ill-advisedly full. He rested his head back against the wall of the hut. 

It occurred to him that if anyone attacked the hut right at that moment, Bucky’d be at a disadvantage, reflexes dulled, body that little bit heavier. 

But no one was going to. No one did.

* * *

Down in Birnin Zana he could buy sour flatbreads topped with lentils, pickled vegetables, piquant stewed meats. He tried them all, working his way systematically around the market. “Are you keeping a list?” Shuri asked, amused, when he told her what he was up to. “Ratings? Will you have a report for me afterwards?”

“That sounds like work,” he said, and she laughed.

One day he bought lunches from three stalls in a row, took all his accumulated bounty out to the broad-leafed shade of an otayita tree, and ate his way through all of it. He shouldn’t have, he thought; it was going to be a long, slow walk back to his hut. He stretched out on his back, feeling like a boa constrictor that’d eaten a deer, sluggish and immense with what he’d eaten. If he were naked like a snake, probably it’d be visible on him. 

He closed his eyes. As he drifted off with the sounds of the market in his ears, he thought, _If I keep this up, I’m gonna get fat_. 

Then he was asleep.

* * *

Bucky’d encountered plantains before. Sometimes his handlers had opted for local foods when he was on a mission, to blend in or just to stay on budget, in the times when they’d cared about that kind of thing. He got his sense of taste burned out of him every so often, back then, so all he remembered from the occasional mission to the tropics was that plantains looked like bananas.

They were, in fact, nothing the fuck like bananas. They were starchy like potatoes, and Wakandans mostly seemed to cook them like potatoes. He liked them mashed and flavored with savory spices. He liked them fried in round slices and drizzled with syrup. He liked them in volume, and that was probably the best thing about them: they filled a guy up like potatoes did.

He’d been hungry for seventy years and not realized it. Thinking back, he wasn’t sure if HYDRA’d kept him that way on purpose, if they’d underestimated his caloric needs, or if they didn’t give a shit as long he kept on ticking. All of the above, probably, depending on the year. Even after, in his years on the run remembering the person of Bucky Barnes, he’d eaten mostly for fuel, always while looking over his shoulder. 

Now he ate to the point of satiation, and then, as often as not, he ate a little bit past it. Sometimes more than a little. _If a giant robot attacks right now, you’re in trouble,_ he’d think after dinner, and then he’d dish up another bowl of goat and lentil on rice. _You’ve had plenty_ , he’d tell himself at the market, and then he’d buy another fried mango wrapped up in a leaf and eat it as he carefully, ponderously made his way home. 

He went a few rounds of that one night. He ate everything left over from lunch, which could have lasted him another meal on its own, and then he ate both the rice desserts he’d brought from the city, and then, his heart racing like he was doing something daring, he broke out his breakfast supply of fruit and dried meat and ate that until he really genuinely didn’t want another bite.

He couldn’t quite catch his breath anymore. That might’ve been in his head, but then again it might not’ve. He felt immense. He felt like one of the mountains ringing Birnin Zana, unmoving and unimaginably massive. He felt like a ship on the sea with his heavy, swollen belly for ballast.

The sky had grown dark as he’d finished stuffing his face. Moving slowly, he went back inside his hut. He lit his lamp, and then he unwrapped his robe and gave himself a good, hard look.

He’d kept this a secret from himself—like a kid with a present, he realized now, though he hadn’t known he’d been doing it. He didn’t have much reason to look at himself in the ordinary way of things, and the robes hid a lot. He’d had a rough idea what he was doing to himself—he did bathe, after all—but he’d declined to think about it. 

Now he looked. All that dinner was visible on him, all right. The same fullness pressing up against his lungs was pushing outward in a taut, swollen curve below his ribs. But what was even more visible were all those other dinners he’d eaten, all those extra desserts he’d grabbed ‘for the road,’ every last indulgent bite. All of it sat right there on him in a soft, comfortable belly. It’d be bulging out over his belt buckle if he still bothered with belts.

“Well, you did it, Barnes,” he said. He swept his hand over the tight curve above, the soft, plush curves below. “You got fat.” He reached further down to pinch his thighs, which he was pretty sure were thicker. Maybe his face was fuller, too; it wasn’t like he kept a mirror around. Maybe it was visible all over, this thing he’d been doing.

He was still too full to move comfortably. He sat down with care that felt exaggerated but also necessary and also—something else, something nudging at the edge of his mind. He crossed his legs and took in the way his belly sat in his lap. He wasn’t quite Buddha-shaped ( _Not yet_ , something whispered), but he was starting to see a resemblance. He palmed his pec, which was a little fuller than he was used to—and yet exactly the size he remembered it from washing two mornings ago.

“You let yourself go, Barnes,” Bucky said experimentally. The heat building in him now wasn’t in his mouth, or even in his stomach, overfull as it was. It was a lot further down. He reached down past the gut he’d grown for himself and wrapped his fingers around his cock. He said, “Bet you couldn’t even fit in those pants.”

He still had one pair, neatly folded and tucked in the shelves with other oddities—gifts from the kids, gifts from Shuri. He hadn’t worn them in months. With his free hand, he gave his belly a squeeze and imagined dragging those jeans up his thighs and trying to yank them closed, the wedge of flesh pinching between the zipper teeth. His dick twitched in his hand. “Fuck,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut.

He lay back on the floor of his hut, knees sprawled, just for that little extra bit of breathing room. He didn’t think he’d ever jacked off before when he was stuffed this full. Every couple of strokes, it was almost too much, like he was walking right up to the edge of feeling sick. He never got there, though. He kept right on riding that edge of ‘almost,’ that extraordinary, swollen fullness. He squeezed his dick with one hand and his soft, fleshy gut with the other, and finally he came with a grunt, spurting over his belly.

It took him a while to catch his breath afterwards. He was sweating again, and after everything, he was still absurdly full of dinner. He stared up at his ceiling and gasped for air.

Retirement was supposed to be about learning more about yourself, right? Finding new hobbies and sources of enjoyment? He was doing _great_.

* * *

At his next checkup with Shuri—all still clear, all good—he asked if he could weigh himself, too. Her eyebrows rose, but she pointed him to the scale he’d used before, which he was pretty sure was mostly for weighing metals and shit for her projects.

He’d put on forty pounds since he’d last woken up from the freezer. Glancing around to be sure no one was watching, he rested his hand on top of his belly. Yeah, that felt right. Fuck.

“It’s that middle-aged spread,” he told Shuri when he got back to her workstation.

“You are not ‘middle-aged’,” she scoffed. “You are either very, very old, or you’re younger than my brother.”

He waited, but she didn’t seem to have anything else to say about his shape, no health warning, no expressions of concern. That gave him the confidence to ask for the other thing he wanted. “Do you think you could help me find a cook to apprentice with? Here in the city?”

You were supposed to have hobbies in retirement, after all. Although he supposed technically goat herding could also count as a hobby.

* * *

Steve was coming back. They’d called every so often. Bucky had told him about the chef he was taking lessons with, the food blog he’d started (very anonymous, obviously). There’d been a couple of video calls, even. Bucky thought some of the changes he’d been making were evident in those, but maybe not unless you were looking for them. 

Their last call before Steve was due to fly in, Bucky tried to warn him. It was hard to know what to say, though. “I’ve changed some since you saw me last. You might not recognize me.”

“That’s stupid, Buck,” Steve said, his voice warm with affection. “I’m always going to recognize you.”

That was sweet, if not strictly true in the historical sense, but it also suggested Bucky had failed to get the message across. Oh well, he thought after they’d hung up. Steve would find out tomorrow.

* * *

The long time apart had apparently worn down all Steve’s manners and impulses towards international diplomacy. He stepped off the plane, strode over to Bucky, and kissed him liked it’d been another seventy years. “You coulda come back sooner,” Bucky said when they eventually came back up for air.

Steve look stricken. “I’ve been—”

“I know what you’ve been, idiot,” Bucky said, before Steve tied himself up into knots. “You’ve been doing important shit.” Probably even blowing up some HYDRA cells, which Steve had promised not to tell him about. Bucky was content to know someone was out there doing it; he didn’t want details. “I’m not saying you shoulda. I’m just saying, I’m here all the time.”

“And now I’m here, too. Is there—is there somewhere we can—” Steve blushed, probably less due to sexual modesty than because he’d realized they’d had an audience. The audience had left while they’d been playing tonsil hockey, though. Now the airfield was empty except for them and the plane.

“Come on,” Bucky said, threading his fingers through Steve’s. “I know what rooms they’re putting you guys in.”

It was when they were inside Steve’s bedroom, door closed, that Bucky found himself with a minor case of nerves. It seemed a little late for that. “Listen, take a good look before you say anything, okay?” He unwrapped his robe, hung it over a chair, and turned around to face Steve and give him the full effect.

Steve kept his mouth shut like Bucky asked. He gave Bucky a slow, lingering once-over that made Bucky’s skin tingle a little. Slowly his face lit with one of those smiles Bucky was never going to get tired of. He stepped in close and put his hands on Bucky’s hips—right over Bucky’s soft new love handles, which Bucky was hotter for than he could ever have guessed—and kissed him again. 

Neither of them got around to saying much of anything for a while after that. 

After a while, Bucky surfaced from a doze. He knew when Steve did, too, by how his breath changed, and still neither of them said anything until Steve said, “You, uh.”

Bucky braced himself.

“You do look—”

“Well-fed?” Bucky offered. 

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Is that—are you happy, Buck?”

“I am now that you’re here, big guy,” Bucky said, which was the most cornball thing he could think of to say and which also happened to be true. Steve laughed softly. Bucky huffed out a sigh and confessed, “Man, I fucking love to eat. I’m making up for lost time here. And—” There was no way out but through. “—and it gets me hot, kind of.”

Steve got that shit-eating grin on his face that meant the best kind of trouble. Relief flooded through Bucky. “You’ll have to show me after dinner.”

“I’ll show you during dinner, if you want,” Bucky said, flushing with his own daring. “Or not. It’s fine if—”

Steve slid his hand over Bucky’s heavy, broad belly. His touch was ludicrously hot, like iron straight out of the fire, like he was branding Bucky with his handprint right then and there, like maybe they were going to have to try and squeeze another round in before dinner. “You’ll have to show me,” he repeated, laughter in his voice.

Bucky wrenched his attention away from that hand on his belly and said, “It’s not just that.”

Steve waited while Bucky got his words together. Steve was getting better at that—waiting Bucky out, letting him pull himself together without butting in to help. At last, Bucky took a deep breath and said, “I’m retired, you know? It’s time for the good things in life. And nobody’s gonna look at me now and say hey, there’s a guy we need to put back in the field.” 

“Like you couldn’t still kick the asses of ninety-nine percent of the unaugmented human population.”

Bucky calculated it at closer to ninety-eight percent, but that was a conversation for another day. “Sure, but nobody’s gonna _say_ it now, is what I’m saying.” He’d never put any of that into words before. He’d never even quite thought it until now, and yet it was just as true as the other reasons. This was why: the joy in the eating, the pleasure of moving slowly because he was swollen too full to move any faster, and this, the rock-solid proof that he was done.

Steve didn’t say anything for a while. He rubbed Bucky’s belly in thoughtful, soothing circles, and finally he shoved in close and kissed Bucky’s cheekbone. “I’m glad, Buck,” he said simply.

* * *

Bucky ate enough at dinner for two people and then lay groaning with pleasure and delicious pain through the first combined belly rub and blow job of his life. It was pretty great. You had to keep trying new things in retirement, after all.


End file.
